Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker

More context-sensitive actions like opening things, taking cover and searching bodies are performed by pressing up on the d-pad; changing stance to crouching or belly-crawling is done by tapping down. Holding left or right takes you into the item and weapons menus. All of the in-game menus are overlaid onto the action - opening up a menu never pauses the game - but all of the detailed options that you need from configuration menus are present and correct. In co-op you can have access to all of your nearby friends' weapons and items, too, all accessed from the same menus. Once you get used to holding different button combinations it's fluid and accessible.

Peace Walker is a game designed around co-op, though it's completable solo as well. Different paths through levels open up when you have two to four minds at work, and you can team up to overcome high ledges and other such environmental obstacles. Every player in co-op has their own personal space circle - stay within a certain radius of each other and you can team up to share items and weapons, or one player can hold up on the d-pad to sneak around in the shadow of the other without having to control their own movement. As the gamescom trailer famously revealed, you can even share camouflage boxes. Watching a four-legged box sneak around in the jungle is somehow even funnier.

Setting up and playing a co-op game is painless; the host chooses a channel, and all the other players need to do to join is tune in to the same channel. You can select one of four Snake archetypes to play as: Jungle Camo Snake, a balanced, all-round build; Sneak Suit Snake, who has a shield for protection but is otherwise a bit useless; Heavy Combat Snake; or Naked Snake. Each loads out with different weapons and equipment. There's no lag and no friction, and it's clear that the game has been envisioned in multiplayer from the very beginning. All of the missions - over a hundred of them - are replayable, too, so you can go back with friends and/or better weapons and open up new paths.

It's the level of detail that cements Peace Walker's status as a full MGS release that just happens to be on a portable console. There's environmental damage - you can shoot coconuts off trees - and context-sensitive injury; you can zoom and pan around in the cut-scenes, like in MGS4, and find hidden extras. The cut-scenes themselves are incredibly detailed and beautiful, and even interactive. One comic-style cut-scene that introduces a new character allows you to zoom and pan around to get a good look at her, changing her costume or, er, stripping her down to her underwear "so you can see her scars". Another cut-scene that Kojima Productions teases us with makes the player take part in the action, getting them to move a rocket-aiming reticule over a helicopter before rewarding them with the beautifully animated explosion.

MGS: Peace Walker is already among the best PSP games I've ever played, and I've only had an hour and a half with it. Besides occasional niggles with the controls, which all the customisation options should do a lot to ease, it's an absolute pleasure to play and to watch. The production values are clearly ridiculous, it's impossibly good-looking, and it's going to give Monster Hunter a run for its money as a four-player co-operative experience. Equally importantly, its four-legged boxes and already convoluted plot hint at the same gentle lunacy that kindled such a fondness in me for the previous games in the series. I can't see how it can go wrong.